


Snakes, Lions, and Flowers

by ashgemini



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Coming Out, Gen, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-25 12:50:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14977517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashgemini/pseuds/ashgemini
Summary: 6 months after the Battle of Hogwarts, Draco gets a tattoo.





	Snakes, Lions, and Flowers

Draco Malfoy is 18 years old and already a war veteran when he stumbles into a muggle tattoo parlor. Not literally stumbles, there are many things about Draco’s upbringing that have rubbed off, but Narcissa’s emphasis on good posture isn’t one of them.

There’s a bored looking receptionist behind the counter who arches a purple eyebrow at him, “Can I help you?” she says.

“I want a tattoo,” says Draco, thrusting out his chin.

The purple eyebrow creeps higher, “Okay, well, have you booked a consultation?”

It’s at this moment that Draco realizes his good breeding and pureblood genes won’t help him here. This isn’t his world, and he’s a nobody here. This knowledge is strangely comforting.

“Um, no,” he says, “Could you help me do that?” And oh, how Lucius would cringe if he could hear that, his son asking for help from a muggle. Draco smiles to himself slightly at that thought.

The girl behind the counter consults a book in front of her, “Normally it takes a few weeks to get a consultation appointment, but Anya had a cancellation today. It’s yours if you’d like it,” she tells Draco.

He finds himself nodding without really thinking about it too hard.

“3:00 today,” says the receptionist and Draco checks his watch, it’s only just now past noon.

“Thank you,” he says, feeling a curl of pleasure in his stomach when he thinks about how those words would make his father feel.

He wanders around London for the next few hours, getting himself a cup of coffee and a muffin from a shop down the road from the tattoo parlor and feeding crumbs from it to the pigeons that are hopping around his feet. It’s a nice day, the first hint of Autumn chill in the air. Normally, he’d be off to Hogwarts at this time of year. He could’ve gone this year too, but Draco decided to put off his eighth year, perhaps indefinitely.

Truth be told, he’s not really sure what he’s going to do. The war had ended and Draco had packed up his things from Malfoy Manner and moved into a shitty apartment in muggle London. The landlord had been thoroughly confused by the pile of gold coins that Draco had tried to pay his rent with, but had been willing enough to accept what Draco later determined was well over double what he should’ve been paying.

Finally, enough time has passed for Draco to make his way back to the tattoo parlor. Shooing away the pigeons that have gathered, he walks a few blocks down the street to the shop. The sign over the door reads “Poison Apple Ink” in a swirly font and the bell above the door clangs when Draco pushes it open.

The receptionist gives Draco a half-hearted wave, “You can wait there for Anya,” she says, pointing to a row of chairs across from her desk. He’s barely sat down when a curvy, dark haired woman walks out from the area behind the desk.

“Hello,” she says in a slightly accented voice. Russian, perhaps. “You’re Drake?”

“Draco,” he says, standing up and shaking her hand. She had a strong grip and Draco notices that the backs of her hands are tattooed with roses. He wonders if that hurt.

“Unusual name,” she says, “Come with me.”

He follows her down the hall behind the desk into a small room. The walls are painted a deep red and plastered with all sorts of drawings and posters. There’s a pair of chairs, as well as a desk and a larger chair that he assumes people sit in while they get tattooed.

“So, what are you thinking about getting?” she asks once they’ve both settled into their chairs.

Well, Draco thinks, might as well get the hard part over with. Without ceremony he shoves up the left sleeve of his hoodie (it’s red, a shade that his family never would’ve let him wear because it’s far too Gryffindor. He takes a perverse sort of pleasure in wearing it now.) “I want this covered up,” he says, gesturing to the ugly mark on his arm.

“We can do that,” says Anya, grasping his wrist and tugging his arm closer to better examine the mark. “What do you want to cover it?”

Draco’s mind stalls out. “I-I don’t know,” he stutters out. “Please just cover it.” To his shock and horror, his voice is shaking slightly.

“Did you want a half-sleeve or just a cover-up for that?” she asks and Draco takes a moment to consider it.

“Half-sleeve,” he tells her, wanting to remove any evidence that the Dark Mark was ever there, ensure that it’s really gone. Draco kept expecting her to send him away because of how ill-prepared he was. But he supposed she’d probably seen weirder than a twitchy 18-year-old.

Anya leans back in her chair and surveys Draco, “Do you have any ideas of what you’d like?”

He thinks it over for a few moments, “A snake, but not like the one that I already have. And a lion. Narcissus flowers too.” He fights back a laugh, thinking about what his family would say about the lion. “You can add other stuff if you want, I don’t really care.”

“We can start today,” she says, “ I’ve got the rest of the day free since the girl who was supposed to come in cancelled. You’ll have to come back for color and some of the shading though.”

“Okay,” says Draco, not sure of what else he should add.

Anya grabs a purple sharpie off of her desk, “Is it okay if I sketch right on your arm? You can take a look at it and tell me what you think before I start tattooing.

“Sure,” says Draco, taking off his sweatshirt and taking a seat in the larger chair he had seen earlier. Anya positions his forearm to her liking and begins to draw.

He can feel the cool tip of the marker tracing across his arm and Draco leans his head back and closes his eyes. It’s strangely calming.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Anya says after some time, “But why are you covering this up? It’s not a bad piece of art. A little dark though.”

Eyes still closed, Draco says “It’s from a bad period in my life. It represents bad people. They made me get it.”

“Ah,” she says, still drawing, “How long have you had it?”

“Since I was 16,” says Draco.

The cool tip of the marker pauses, very briefly, before resuming, “You got a tattoo at 16? What kind of a shop would tattoo a 16-year-old?”

“These weren’t good people,” Draco says, voice shaking ever so slightly. Anya must notice the shake, because she doesn’t ask any more questions.

A while later, she tells him to take a look, and at first all Draco can see is a swirl of purple ink, but when he looks closer he can see a snake curled down the back of his arm, wrapping around his wrist and it’s head sitting nearly on the back of his hand. A lion stretches across his forearm, so real it looks like it could leap off of his skin. The empty spaces between the two animals are filled with flowers; narcissus, roses, and dogwoods.

“It’s perfect,” Draco says.

Anya grins at him and gets up, busying herself with setting up little pots of ink and her tattoo machine. “Ready?” she says with another grin and Draco nods, grinning back.

The machine makes a humming noise that’s louder than he expects, but the first press of the needle in his arm isn’t as bad as he was expecting. “That’s not so bad,” he says with a bit of a laugh.

Anya quirks an eyebrow at him, “Shouldn’t you already know what tattoos feel like?”

He’s not sure how to respond to that. Draco remembers kneeling in front of the Dark Lord in his parents sitting room, arm stretched out in front of him. Those skeletally white fingers gripping his wrist and pressing the tip of his wand into Draco’s flesh. It was a pain that Draco didn’t have a reference for, there was nothing he could compare it to.

Before, his father had pulled him aside and gripped his shoulder, “Don’t scream,” said Lucius.

He hadn’t understood those instructions, but once he did, he wished he hadn’t.

This feels nothing like that. The chair he’s sitting in is far more comfortable than kneeling on the cold marble floor, and compared to the Dark Mark, this barely tickles.

“It was different, before,” is what Draco tells Anya, after far too long.

“Ah yes,” she says, rotating his arm a bit, “Bad people.”

“Yeah, bad people. My family, too. They’re bad people,” Draco isn’t entirely sure why he’s opening up to this stranger, “Well, not my mom. She’s okay.”

“That’s good,” said Anya, wiping his arm off with a damp cloth and admiring her work, “Do you still speak to them?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” Draco says, dodging hers.

She pauses and grins at him, she has a nice smile, the sort that lights up her whole face, “People like to talk to tattoo artists about their lives, but sometimes they need a little prompting.”

That does make a certain sort of sense, Narcissa and her friends used to gossip with their hairdressers in Diagon Alley, so perhaps it’s the same principle. “Right, so I moved out when I was 17 after a lot of bad things happened. I still talk to my mother, write her letters and stuff, but I don’t talk to my dad anymore.”

Anya doesn’t respond, just keeps working, but nods slightly to reassure Draco that she heard him. “I’m working in a bookstore now, a few blocks away from here actually. I always wear long sleeves to cover this up, and one of the regulars suggested getting it covered up. He’s the one who recommended this place to me.”

“What’s his name?” Anya asked, “Maybe I know him.”

“John, I think. John Constantine. Liverpool accent, always smoking a cigarette?”

Anya’s face lit up, “Johnny! Hayden tattoos him, he’s got a bunch of cool blackwork on his back. He’s a good guy.”

“Little weird though,” Draco says and Anya nods in agreement, “Anyway, he noticed I was wearing long sleeves in July and talked to me about it, convinced me I should get it covered. I’ve been trying to work up the courage to actually come do it ever since.”

“So before, the bad people,” Anya says, apparently moving on from the subject of John Constantine, “Were you in a cult? A gang? I’m trying to understand what happened.”

“A cult, I guess you’d call it,” Draco says.

“A cult that tattoos children with identifying marks?” Anya says, still bothered by how young Draco was when he received the mark.

Draco shrugs as best he can without jostling the arm that Anya is tattooing, “Yeah.”

“That’s so fucked up,” she says plainly. She’s right, of course, and Draco knows she’s right. But it’s not the sort of thing people just come out and say.

“I was a bad person too,” Draco says, for some reason desperate to make her understand that he played a part in this, that he wasn’t just a chess piece, “I did bad things for them, but I’m trying to do better.”

“You were a child, you don’t carry the blame for whatever it is they made you do,” and Anya, once again, is right. The Wizengamot had pardoned everyone who had still been a student during the war, Draco hadn’t even stood trial. His father had, though. Draco hadn’t gone to the trial, wasn’t sure if it would’ve been worse to watch his father arrested again or pardoned. In hindsight, Draco thinks he would’ve preferred it if Lucius was arrested.

“So you left home because of your family’s involvement in this cult?” Anya asked.

Draco sighed and ran his free hand through his hair. Lately, he hadn’t been gelling it back, just letting it flop into his eyes. “Partially,” and before Draco can go on he has to take a deep breath and calm the shakes he can feel beginning in his body, “Partially because I’m gay, and my father wasn’t okay with it.”

Draco’s sexuality had been the last straw for Lucius. There had been one final argument, screamed across the entrance hall of Malfoy Manor, echoing off the marble floors and making it sound like there were dozens of people yelling, instead of the two Malfoy men screaming at each other while Narcissa sobbed quietly, arms wrapped around herself.

Draco had stormed upstairs and packed his bags, throwing expensive silk shirts haphazardly into bags and apparated to Pansy’s house. She’d raised an eyebrow at his tear streaked face and the bag over his shoulder and said, “I guess you’d better come inside.” He’d stayed there for a few days before moving to London. That had been nearly 6 months ago now.

Since then, magic had become a minor thing in his life. He used his wand to boil the kettle for tea, or scrub pots if he was too lazy to do it the muggle way, but he found that more and more he was doing things himself instead of reaching for magic. Perhaps someday, Draco would return to the magical world, but for now he needed some separation.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” says Anya, jolting him back to the present, and Draco shrugs. He’s come a long way towards making peace with it.

They pair sits in silence for a long time, Draco examining the art on the walls and Anya concentrating on the tattoo.

Finally, the needled pauses and Anya wipes off the design, “You’ll have to come back in a few weeks for color and the rest of the shading, but it’s done for today.”

Draco examines his arm, first looking at the lion the covers the space where the Dark Mark had been, and he can’t believe Anya created this without magic. The flowers and the snake are mostly just outlines and linework, and Draco can see how they’ll look just as vividly realistic as the lion once Anya finishes them. He’s grateful that she finished the lion today, that he didn’t have to stare at the mark for another moment.

Anya is talking about what colors she thinks would work for the flowers, how she wants to add some blackwork sunrays radiating up the inside of his arm, but Draco cuts her off, “It’s perfect, Anya, thank you”

There’s still so much more Draco wants to do to move on from everything that he’s done, apologies he owes and amends to make, but today he feels more whole than he has since he was 16 years old.

**Author's Note:**

> Prove to me that John Constantine doesn't exist in the same universe as Harry Potter. 
> 
> The tattoo artist is based on an actual artist, her Instagram is tattoosbyanya if any of you guys want to check out her stuff.


End file.
